Changing indentation and paragraph spacing for styled text in final compile

Scrivener
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I have a manuscript which makes heavy use of quotes. I have been using the built in Block Quote style to style these. I like how the quotes are formatted in the Scrivener interface when I’m editing. The quotes are embedded and paragraphs spaced slightly different, making them much easier to differentiate when reading.

However, when I compile (to .docx or .pdf) the first line indentation of a new paragraph and the indentation for the Block Quote style are exactly the same. This means that if I have a short first sentence in a paragraph, and then a styled quote, it is difficult to distinguish the body text from the Block Quote styled text.

I’ve read lots of things and watched videos etc. and played around with a lot of options but haven’t got it to work. What I want to do is change the paragraph indentation on the Block Quote style and have this render in the compile. I’ve managed to change the indent on the Block Quote style in the Scrivener interface (which looks fine as default anyway), but this doesn’t change how the Block Quote style looks in my compile. How do I change indentation and paragraph spacing for styled text so that it appears differently in the final compile?

I feel like I must be missing something simple. It seems silly that you would be able to change how the interface looks but not the final compile. I don’t care much what the interface looks like – I only want my final compile to look good!

I’m on macOS with Scrivener 3. Thank you for any help.

p.s. Mods, not being able to embed images or include links makes it much more difficult to explain something like this.

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As an anti-spam measure, new posters are restricted in their ability to post screenshots and links. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.

To redefine styles via the Compile command, see Section 24.5 of the (Mac) Scrivener manual.

1 Like
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Ah fair enough.

Thanks for the pointer. Ooft, I just had a journey. Your app is good but it’s sure a mindbender!

I did what I wanted in the end, but I did have some trouble with the ruler in the preview window, when you’re overwriting a style via the compile menu and then clicking on a section type, being out of sync with what it ended up being in Microsoft Word. Maybe Scrivener and Word calculate page widths differently, or maybe I missed something. I only got the style I wanted in the end by moving the front and end points on the ruler in Scrivener, checking it in Word, tweaking again, etc. Anyway, I achieved what I wanted to, but I thought I’d flag in case that’s a bug. Thank you!

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In Scrivener, the ruler “zero” is at the leftmost edge of the text. The reason being that the page size and margins can change independently of the text.

(The exception is Page View mode. In Page View mode, the page size is temporarily known, and so the ruler zero is at the edge of the page.)